The Economist - USA (2020-02-01)

The EconomistFebruary 1st 2020 Business 57

I

n november 1999the Internet Corpora-

tion for Assigned Names and Numbers

(icann), which oversees the web’s address

book, held its inaugural annual gathering.

Two decades later the online world faces

another constitutional moment, this time

courtesy of a company which has profited

from the internet’s stupendous growth—

and is blamed for many of its ills, from pri-

vacy abuses to the spread of disinforma-

tion. On January 28th Facebook unveiled a

draft of the bylaws of what it calls an “over-

sight board”: an independent group of ex-

perts charged with the power to review—

and overturn—decisions by the firm’s army

of content moderators. The world’s largest

social-media conglomerate hopes to have

the body up and running in a few months.

Some hope the entity will evolve into an

online ombudsman—perhaps even a “su-

preme court” for other big Western inter-

net platforms—to oversee not just content

moderation, but data-gathering and algo-

rithm design. Others view it as no more

than Facebook’s figleaf: an attempt to fore-

stall real regulation and palm off responsi-

bility for controversial posts. What should

users, regulators and investors make of it?

The board certainly looks like a serious

effort at institution-building—something

“no firm has ever done before”, in the

words of Kate Klonick of St John’s Universi-

ty School of Law in New York, who was al-

lowed to play fly on the wall as the board’s

contours were drawn up. Facebook hired a

(majority-female) team of 12 people, most-

ly lawyers, to oversee the body’s creation.

Some used to work at the White House and

the un; others came from media firms and

consultancies. Over the past year they so-

licited input from more than 2,500 people

at 60-odd workshops around the world.

The result is unique: a sort of regulatory

startup. The board will have its own staff of

30-40, budget (Facebook has earmarked

$130m over six years) and a trust to manage

it all. Facebook will appoint the first three

co-chairs, who will then recruit other

members (for a total of 40, each serving a

twice-renewable three-year term). The

board will have its own website to receive

and review appeals. These can be lodged by

users of Facebook (and of Instagram, its

photo-sharing app) who feel their post has

been unfairly removed and not restored. If

the company itself is having trouble decid-

ing whether to restore content, it too can

file “emergency requests”.

Each submission triggers a 90-day pro-

cess. The emergency requests will be han-

dled faster: in 30 days. If the board agrees to

hear a case, a group of five members (who

will remain anonymous for security rea-

sons) consults experts and makes a deci-

sion, which it must present in plain lan-

guage. Facebook has a week to comply with

a ruling (and can apply it to selfsame con-

tent elsewhere on the network). The board

can also make “policy recommendations”,

such as amending Facebook’s “community

standards”. Though these are non-binding,

the firm will have to explain itself publicly

if it chooses to ignore them.

Internet-governance nerds have ques-

tions aplenty. Will users and authorities

deem the board legitimate? Much will

hinge on the geographic and biographical

diversity of its initial members, reckons Ms

Klonick. Will it have the capacity to deal

with appeals? The board is expected to con-

sider no more than a few dozen cases a

year, compared with 3.4m posts Facebook

declined to restore in the first quarter of

2019 alone (not counting spam, see chart).

Some fear that Facebook could flood it with

emergency requests to distract from incon-

venient ones for the company.

Most important of all, how powerful

andindependent will Facebook allow the

board to become? And how will it affect the

firm’s business? The answer is not very and

notmuch—for now. The board’s decisions

willbe based not on real-world laws but on

the community standards, which are

vague. Initially it will only rule whether in-

dividual pictures and posts ought to have

been taken down, though the company

promises to extend the board’s ambit to en-

tireFacebook pages and groups and also to

whether certain posts should be up in the

firstplace, once the technical infrastruc-

tureis in place. If this makes the social net-

workseem more salubrious, it may lure

more corporate advertisers, the fount of Fa-

cebook’s revenues (which grew more slow-

lylast quarter than ever before).

Things would get more complicated

were the board granted a say on how Face-

book gathers data or designs algorithms.

The company does not rule out the pos-

sibility. But Nathaniel Persily of Stanford

Law School argues that broadening the

board’s remit too far, too fast, could be

tough. Unlike for content, he observes, no

proven judicial model exists for reviewing

algorithms. More cynically, Dipayan Ghosh

of Harvard University, who once worked at

Facebook, doubts the firm would ever ac-

cept limits on the data it collects or what

content its algorithms show in the Face-

book newsfeed.

The last set of unknowns concerns how

others, notably governments and rival

platforms, will react. If Big Tech takes up

Facebook’s invitation to sign up to its cre-

ation, it could indeed turn into a court of

appeal for cyberspace. This looks unlikely

in the near term: why would a Google let

someone else tie its hands? Some govern-

ments, for their part, may see the board as

competing with official efforts to regulate

speech online. However, both could yet

find the nascent entity useful: a comple-

ment to government action and, if pressure

on internet firms to moderate content

mounts, a substitute for bodies they would

otherwise need to convene themselves.

A lot rests on how the oversight board

turns out in practice. This will take time to

assess. Even 20 years after its birth icann

is a work in progress; just look at the con-

troversy over the recent $1bn sale of .org, a

domain mostly used by charities, to a priv-

ate-equity firm. At a time when the internet

is torn between its non-commercial roots

and its hyper-commercial present, Face-

book’s experiment is worth pursuing. 7

MENLO PARK

Facebook prepares to hand decisions about contentious content to an

independent arbiter

Online governance

A court of public opinions

Unappealing caseload

Source:Company reports

Facebook, items of blocked content*

Q12019,m

*Excluding spam and fake accounts

01234

Total

appeals

Appeals

denied

Pornography Abusivespeech

Violence& graphiccontent Drugs & firearms

Terrorist propaganda

Facebook’s self-examination